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Embezzlement Investigation’s “First Family”

Did you know that an entire family works for Prosperident?

Scott Clifford is one of Prosperident’s most senior investigators. He heads our Special Investigations group (“where the unusual happens every day and the unimaginable happens about once a month”).

Scott’s wife, Rose, started her Prosperident career by helping Scott work on cases. She is now an Intermediate Analyst who coordinates the receipt of information for new cases we take on.

Scott and Rose’s gifted 14 year old daughter Miki had a school assignment of writing a job application letter to a company. She naturally chose her parents’ workplace. What she didn’t expect was that her letter so impressed our CEO that he actually offered her a job. So Miki now combines her schoolwork with improving Prosperident’s electronic communications.

It makes absolutely no sense that you can book an airline ticket to Ulaanbaatar (it’s the capital of Mongolia, if you are curious) online, but that patients could not schedule their own dental appointments online.

So when our friends at Solutionreach developed a solution called Limelight that allows patients to do exactly that, we thought you might be interested, and we asked them to tell us about it. Here is what they said:

For better or worse, technology has become a ubiquitous aspect of modern life. We work on computers for our jobs and continue using them when we get home. Our cellphones have more computing power individually than all of NASA had for the lunar landings. We are a tech-savvy society, and your practice needs to keep pace.

According to the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Americans looked online for health information, and 77 percent used a search engine to locate a healthcare provider in 2013. Not surprisingly, this number is expected to continue growing as more and more Americans integrate laptops and smartphones into their daily lives.

One of the most interesting and important developments in this area is the desire for people to be able to schedule appointments online from their computers and smartphones. Many industries such as restaurants, salons, and even auto body shops, have been offering this service for a number of years. The technology already exists and has shown to be reliable. Yet despite the software being available, only about 20 percent of healthcare providers offer an online scheduling service to patients.

Barbara’s son was arrested for stealing $4,000 from the local fire department. He had to pay it back, plus he ran up some legal bills. So she stole it from the dental office where she worked. She was ordered to pay back $142,000

Over the past week, I’ve encountered a couple of similar situations, which leads me to believe that this scenario is worthy of my writing about it.

Both situations started with a call from a practice owner who had just discovered that an employee had previously embezzled from another practice.

While this isn’t my focus today, I’ll mention that this does highlight the poor job that most dentists do when screening job applicants; in both cases this information was discoverable before hiring. An article on proper pre-employment screening is here.

In both calls, we were being asked to see if these employees were now embezzling. I think that the hope of my callers was that if our investigation came back “clean”, they could stop worrying about these employees.

Unfortunately it fell to me to burst their bubbles, and I told each caller that in my view, the employees should be fired immediately.

Embezzlers are people who, responding to a particular set of pressures, chose to steal. Many others, in similar circumstances, adopted some other solution. The probability that, over the duration of their employment, those pressures will reoccur is considerable.

Once someone has shown a preparedness to cross the “criminal threshold”, particularly if doing so had relatively few consequences, the likelihood of recidivism is high.

There are certainly people (and I count myself among them) who, after youthful miscreance, choose to change their behavior. I know and admire many people who mad a positive change in direction.

However, both of the employees in question failed a basic honesty test when applying for their current positions — they could have owned up to their pasts instead of concealing them. Since both got their jobs on the basis of lies, this tells me that they have not yet turned the corner towards honesty, and are “ticking time bombs”.

While it wasn’t exactly what my callers were hoping to hear from me, I’m pleased to tell you that both have taken my advice and have parted company with these employees.

Thanks for reading, and here’s hoping that you don’t have such a problem in your office.

David Harris CPA, CMA, MBA, CFE, CFF

Chief Executive Officer

Prosperident is the world’s largest firm investigating financial crimes committed against dentists.